("I ask Natour what potential he thinks literature has in this situation. And what about his own work, translating Hebrew literature into Arabic, is … - Salman Natour

("So what about Palestinian culture, in terms of those who live here in Israel, as opposed to in the West Bank or in Gaza?") SN: There are no conflicts and no real cultural differences, but of course our lives are different. They live under a military occupation, and we live under a cultural occupation...we have to differentiate between three different groups of Palestinian writers: Palestinians living in Israel, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinians living abroad. As far as Palestinians in Israel are concerned, I can speak from experience. I have written about Jews myself. They are my friends, I meet them everywhere, every day. My experience of Jews is well rounded, and so I can write about how they live at home with their families, with their wives, how they love and how they hate. Because I know. It's different for a writer living in Ramallah. He cannot write about anything other than settlers or soldiers at the checkpoints - whereas I can write a short story about myself and a Jewish friend discussing love and the universe, a writer in Ramallah couldn't even imagine that. And he doesn't need to either, because the Jew is the occupying force, and you don't write about occupying forces as anything other than occupying forces.

I was born in 1949, into a war, and started school in 1956, the year of the Suez War. I finished high school in 1967 during the Six-Day War, married in 1973, the year of the Yom Kippur War. My first child was born in the middle of the 1970s, when war was raging in Lebanon; my second child was born in 1982, when Israel annihilated Beirut with bombs, and my father died during the Gulf War. My whole life is mapped out by wars. When I talk to my Israeli peers, they say, 'It's the same with me.' And I say, 'But is that a good thing? Or should we do something about it?' I'm trying to fight against all this, so that my children's lives and the lives of my grandchildren are not always described by wars.'

a thief's feeling of guilt lies deep in the Israeli psyche. Many of them know that they are guilty. The politicians and military cannot allow themselves to say or feel that they are in any way at fault, of course, but now and then a writer feels it. And they deal with this feeling in one of two ways: either they try to repress it, or they try to find a solution. Every so often, Israeli writers try to make contact and protest against the occupation. The problem is that they seldom talk about al-Nakba and their responsibility for what happened in 1948...That is the reason why they don't want to let the 1948 refugees back, because then they will have to admit that they have been lying the whole time. Because the official version has always been that the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily. It is a psychological and moral problem...What I try to tell the Jews is that they can ask me, as a Palestinian, to help them solve their guilt problem. I don't want them, or us, to carry on suffering.